House Republicans announce plans to produce content for Fox News

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Before we get too far into the incoming House Republican majority’s plans for putting pressure on President Biden, consider this tweet from the party’s caucus on the House Judiciary Committee.

That tweet is now a-month-and-a-half-old, but it has aged far beyond that. It was offered as Ye, the musician born Kanye West, was starring in a lengthy interview by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and with Elon Musk poised to take control of Twitter. In the days that followed, Vice News obtained footage of Ye making explicitly antisemitic comments that Carlson cut from his broadcast. In the weeks that followed, Musk’s takeover of Twitter hit some rough patches, to put it mildly. And former president Donald Trump earned a good deal of attention about a month after the tweet for having helped his party fare unexpectedly badly in the midterm elections.

But why tweet it in the first place? Why is it useful for the minority caucus of a House committee to publish a social media post obviously aimed at ginning up attention from Republican and right-wing users? What’s the point? What’s the value?

The answer, of course, is specifically that it attracts attention — a central focus of the committee’s leaders, if not the preeminent one.

On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee ranking Republican member Jim Jordan (Ohio) participated in a news conference at which his party outlined its plans to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son. The Republican minority on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform published a document that it suggested offered sufficient predicate for a probe, including that “Biden Family Members and Associates [were] Profiting Off Public Office.”

“Republicans’ inquiry quickly established that few in the President’s extended family have failed to capitalize on their relationship with Joe Biden.”

“From Valerie Biden Owens, the President’s ‘sister, confidante, and longtime political strategist,’ penning a book about the Biden family shortly after the inauguration to Francis ‘Frank’ Biden ‘promot[ing] his relationship to the commander-in-chief in an Inauguration Day advertisement for the law firm he advises[,]’ the Biden family’s monetization of the President’s time in Washington is well documented.”

Contrasting that with the activity of Trump family members is left as an exercise to the reader.

Much of the document (titled “A President Compromised: The Biden Family Investigation”) centers on the decision by social media companies to limit a New York Post story about emails and photographs believed to have originated on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden — certainly a tangent to an investigation of the Bidens, if connected at all.

At the news conference, Jordan highlighted that aspect of the story. He suggested that the media’s presentation of the material from Hunter Biden had evolved in a way that increasingly proved him and the GOP right about its significance. That’s not the case. Most outlets were blocked from reviewing the material at the time, making it difficult to report on the contents. (Fox News itself passed on the story.) When The Washington Post obtained the material, we were able to validate some but not all of it. But here was Jordan trying to score rhetorical points on a sidebar issue almost entirely unrelated to the Bidens as he and his party outlined what they were planning when they become the majority in 2023.

But the news conference did do what news conferences are designed to do: get media attention. Specifically, Jordan and Oversight ranking Republican member James Comer (Ky.) were invited onto Fox News’s prime time programming to explain their arguments. Arguments, you will not be surprised to learn, that Hannity and other Fox News hosts have been making for months.

There’s a pattern to the investigatory process here. Back in 2013 and…